English Dept. creates Internet course guide

The English Department's student Undergraduate Advisory Board is launching a new venture on the Internet. The electronic course review, which the group hopes to complete by the end of the semester for consultation during the drop/add period, will be a compilation of student reviews of English courses. The guide, which is the first of its kind at the University, is intended to give majors the opportunity to select courses by considering the opinions of others who have taken them previously. Students in each English course will be requested to write a short evaluation of the class and instructor by sending it to an e-mail account -- course-review@english. The reviews will then be confidentially posted on the English Gopher and available in a form much like that of the Undergraduate Course Guide. According to English Department Chairperson Alan Filreis, there will be "no attempt to make the review a statistically true sampling" of students in the courses. "You have to remember that people who respond are usually enthusiastic one way or the other," he said. "Naturally, it's going to be tilted toward extreme responses." Filreis added that although he thinks the review is "a fabulous idea," "it's a very personal thing for faculty." The project's originator, College junior David Markowitz, said reaction to the project has been mostly positive -- although several students and faculty have voiced reservations. "Some are worried that people might put in unduly negative reactions that would skew the rest of the comments and drive people away from classes that might be useful to them," he said. Filreis said because of the criticism, the review may not be available for this semester. "We're still discussing the whole thing," he said. "I wouldn't have posted a memo [on the Internet] if I weren't really serious about it, but we really want everyone to be behind the project before we go ahead with it." Markowitz explained that the UAB is attempting to determine a way to control the extreme opinions. "We're trying to figure out a way to control the flames by getting people to back up their negative comments," Markowitz said. "If they think a professor is bad, we want to know why." He added that he hopes students will take advantage of the wide range of comments. "The course reviews that they have right now are kind of limited because [the book] can't print whole extended comments," he said. "Since they're subjective, you need more text to understand them. "This will allow people to read the comments and put whatever value they want on them," he added. Filreis said the University's course descriptions are "summarized and paraphrased." The gopher, he explained, "can contain infinite amounts of space." Markowitz said that as the English Department becomes increasingly electronic-based, the usefulness of an on-line program is growing. College senior Lucy Oh, another UAB member, said the project has been in the works for about a year. "We wanted to focus on the English majors to create a more specialized unofficial guide," she added. "We're going to edit the reviews and put them on the gopher as a service to the department." Oh explained that the idea emerged from a UAB proposal and has since been organized by Markowitz. The UAB is currently soliciting response to the proposal which can be sent via e-mail to english-uab@english.